


ground me & keep me whole

by untiltheveryend



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:30:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5887756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/untiltheveryend/pseuds/untiltheveryend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Poe, <i>warm</i> and <i>home</i> have always been synonyms. Just like light is good and dark is bad. Just like Luke is the sun coming up or the gentle stirring of leaves in a breeze so light you can’t even feel it against your cheek, or some other incredibly cliched metaphor.</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>Poe Dameron is in love with Luke Skywalker and the rest, as they say, is history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ground me & keep me whole

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [to the sky without wings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5609887) by [leupagus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/pseuds/leupagus). 



> the versions of these characters used here are stolen from to the sky without wings by leupagus. read that first. then probably cry for a while about how amazing it was and maybe then come read this. it isn’t a band-aid for the gaping wound caused by that fic, but it is some musings about love, and these beautiful characters, and some of the ways in which they are broken and beautiful. 
> 
> hope you enjoy!

Poe Dameron has loved Luke Skywalker his entire life. He doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t ache instinctually for the warmth of Luke’s hand curled around his. For some, that might have become a burden. Something to bear through life, to carry on their back until there was a dip between their shoulders forged by it’s weight. 

Not so for Poe Dameron. 

Poe has always found comfort in knowing exactly where his heart belongs. (Kala likes to roll her eyes and tell him ‘Your heart belongs in your chest, blockhead’. Both of them know that it isn’t that simple). He isn’t sure what life would be like if he didn’t know what it was to love someone so completely as he loves Luke. As a brother and a friend and, yes, a lover. As an equal. It isn’t any one thing, just like it isn’t not any of those things either. 

He got all of this out to Jess one night after they had both had a fairly damning amount of alcohol, not long after his first and least successful attempt at seducing Luke.

‘It’s not that I don’t want to, you know-’ 

‘Fuck him?’ Jess had offered.

Poe had been startled into a laugh. “Right, that. I do, I really do. Like, if it was on the table there’s no way I would say no. It’s just, that isn’t the reason.’

‘Isn’t the reason for what?’ Jess had asked.

‘It isn’t the reason I love him. Sure, he’s good to look at, but there’s other stuff.’ Poe had gestured helplessly. ‘He feels like home.’

Poe has never been very good with words - he’s always mixing them up and using them for his own nefarious intentions - but he thinks he got that one just right. Because for Poe, _warm_ and _home_ have always been synonyms. Just like light is good and dark is bad. Just like Luke is the sun coming up or the gentle stirring of leaves in a breeze so light you can’t even feel it against your cheek, or some other incredibly cliched metaphor.

(Just because something is a cliche doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Sometimes Poe thinks his entire life might be a cliche.)

 

But then he is rolled up in a duvet in his quarters for the tenth day in a row because Luke is gone, really gone, and he thinks about _home_. And he thinks about _warm_. And he figures it out. Realises that Luke has disappeared and he has disappeared (into his bedroom, into himself) and that it’s the _same thing_. 

He leaves his bed for the first time in 48 hours. Kala shouts at him from the couch as he rushes past her out of their quarters, halfway to a sprint and halfway dressed.

‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’

He doesn’t bother replying. 

General Organa is staring wearily at a stack of no doubt very important and incredibly boring papers when he bursts into her office. 

‘He’s alive,’ Poe gasps out. 

The General’s face cracks, the hardened mask of professionalism slipping so that Poe can see traces of something that is not quite hope. Something that is not quite love, either. 

‘He contacted you?’ Leia asks, and Poe knows her well enough, this woman who he has spent years loving and hating and recklessly obeying, that he sees the slight hurt in the words. That it wouldn’t have been him, Poe Dameron, who heard from Luke first. 

Poe shakes his head hurriedly, and Leia slumps back in her chair. Her face has slipped back into it’s mask of weary calm.

‘Then how, Colonel. I can’t feel even a trace of him, and we both know he shines brighter for me than for you.’ 

Poe stares her down with bright eyes. ‘We’ve been looking outside ourselves, or at least I have been. And then I realised,’ he pauses to sink into a chair. His legs are shaking. ‘I realised that there is a part of Luke inside of me. That I stole, or he gave me. Or maybe it just grew there, but the point is, it’s still there. That warmth.’ 

Leia’s breath hitches, and Poe doesn’t think he has ever heard his General make a sound like that before. 

‘It’s still there,’ Leia murmurs, and then suddenly she is furious. ‘He’s hiding, the coward, even from me. Just wait ‘till I find him. He and I are going to have a long talk, right after I punch him in the nose.’ 

And there is something in this woman in front of him, forged of fire and love, that makes Poe believe with all certainty that she will. It is the most he has believed in anything since- well. 

Since he was four years old and he met Luke Skywalker in a tree. 

 

It gets easier after that. Now that Poe knows where the part of him that will never forget Luke is located, he can push that part of him aside. He gets back into the hangar, ambling about with BB-8 trailing behind him and sticking his nose into other people’s engine compartments. Eventually they stop treating him like he is made of spun sugar and start letting him get his fingers greasy. It keeps him sane.

At night, he lets it all rush over him. Takes deep breaths that are only a little wobbly and lets himself remember the feeling of Luke’s lips against his own. He aches with it, like a deep and blossoming bruise. He can’t stop poking it for fear of it fading away forever. 

He is terrified of forgetting. 

 

Poe has loved Luke for as long as he can remember. It is a fact of his existence, albeit a fact that he wasn’t always aware of, or sure of. Poe can’t even imagine living without the truth of it grounding him, keeping him whole.

He and Leia talk about that sometimes, especially now that Han and Chewy are gone. She tells him that she’s always had that place inside of her for Luke, even when she didn’t know he existed. 

‘I was always looking for him, even when I didn’t know who or what I was looking for,’ Leia tells him. 

Poe tries to imagine what that must have felt like, to feel that warmth inside you without ever knowing what it was. It makes him shiver. 

Leia sighs, and Poe goes back to winding a stray strand of wire around and around his fingers. It is a habit that he has picked up unconsciously, he thinks, from the General. Leia winds the ends of her hair around her fingers sometimes, although it is a habit she only indulges in private. 

Increasingly, Poe finds it hard to think of Leia as the General, his commanding officer rather than as Leia, his friend. 

(He has never thought of her as a princess, although he has never doubted that she is one.) 

However, personal tragedies or no, there is a war to win. Or at least, a war to fight. And in war there is little place for indulgences of habit and even less for dredging up remnants of the past. 

 

Poe has always been quick to trust. In war, trust is something of a double edged sword. Too much too fast, and you might put your life in the wrong hands. And yet too little trust is dangerous as well. If you don’t trust the people that you are fighting beside, how can you ever win? 

The resistance forces find themselves trapped in a cycle of new faces, every battle won or fought accounting for empty seats at tables. Seats that have to be filled. Poe sits in Leia’s office and watches her sort through the paperwork methodically. Which lives will be best placed where. Who she can trust, who she is going to have to learn to trust. He wonders how much it has cost her to get this good at her job, because he knows how much it hurts to write letters with shaking fingers, detailing the death of someone he barely knew, whose life he was entrusted with. He knows how hard it is to grip tightly the hand of whoever comes to fill the empty seat and smile wide. 

In a war like theirs, there are no easy battles. 

He learns to place his trust in the right places like a child learns to walk. With the aid of some gentle encouragement and more than a few bruises along the way. 

 

He trusts Finn right away, and maybe that is because he is desperate and tired and hurting (he is, increasingly, starting to understand why Luke always looked so tired) but maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is because this defected Stormtrooper - FN-21-whatever - meets his eyes with more truth and honesty than Poe has ever come to expect from strangers. 

There is something about a firefight, Poe has always believed, that is the making or breaking of a relationship. But even in those moments when that bond has been first formed, it has never been as easy before as it is with Finn. 

Poe isn’t sure he wants to think about that too hard. 

(It is all he thinks about, as he limps through the deserted wasteland of Jakku and charms his way back to base with empty pockets and a wide smile. How easy it is to gain something, and how much easier to lose it. How rare it is for him to have the love that he does, that never seems to be less or more, only different.)

 

The General tells their forces that Poe Dameron is a hero for what he has done. If her voice shakes, he is sure that nobody notices but him. 

 

It takes Poe hours to find Rey but only moments to notice her. For a single heartbeat, he thinks that it is Luke, and then he processes the sensation more thoroughly. Sharper, and more jittery than Luke but very nearly as bright. It certainly drowns out everyone else on base. 

Poe is heading to find whoever it is when he is derailed in the hangar by a seemingly simple question that ends with his head and torso buried underneath one of the older and more finicky X-wings. When he finally emerges, victorious, he decides he needs a shower before he does anything else.

By the time he is back on the scent of the second most powerful jedi he has ever been in the vicinity of, the warmth has faded. Or maybe not faded, maybe just focused elsewhere. He heads in the general direction, until he is close enough that all he can feel is a muddling sort of all-around sensation. 

Then he starts looking the old-fashioned way. He finds Finn first, and then about two seconds later he finds Rey. Finn is laid out in the medi-ward, hooked up to a monitor and blissfully unconscious. Rey is at his side, completely focused on Finn.

Poe’s first thought is that Finn never mentioned that the girl he was so eager to find was a jedi. His second thought is Oh-God-What-Happened.

‘Finn?’ Poe asks, for want of something better. 

The girl looks up at him. It is like having a floodlight focused right at his face. Poe blinks several times as he adjusts to the sensation. There is nobody on base these days except Leia who is stronger than mildly force sensitive, and he had almost forgotten how overwhelming being near a true jedi can be. 

‘Who are you?’ the girl asks, bluntly. 

‘Poe Dameron.’

The girl’s face lights up. ‘I know your BB-8 unit!’

Poe blinks at her for the second time. ‘Oh,’ he says. And then, ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Rey,’ she tells him. And he knows, the instant she says it, that she truly thinks that is all she is. 

 

Since his news is slightly less urgent this time, Poe pauses to knock on the door before he barges uninvited into the General’s office. She is talking with one of the senior officers on the reconnaissance team (Poe can never manage to keep straight anyone’s rank. Or their names for that matter) but she ushers the officer out when she sees the expression on Poe’s face.

‘Can you feel her?’ Poe blurts out, before Leia has even sat down.

‘Can I feel who?’ Leia asks. Poe rolls his eyes. 

‘Rey. The girl who found BB-8 on Jakku. She is stronger with the force than nearly anyone I’ve ever known, and I don’t even think she knows it.’

Leia nods. ‘Yes. I feel it too. But like you said, she’s untrained, and we both know that the only person left who could train her is lost to us.’

Poe gapes at her. ‘You want to train her- Leia. She could find Luke!’

‘Poe,’ Leia starts, but Poe cuts over her. 

‘She's twice as sensitive as you or I, maybe more. Yes, we both have a special connection to Luke, but Rey could follow a trail of breadcrumbs without even noticing she was doing it. I watched her, Leia. She walks with it, like she can never step wrong even without looking. If anyone can find him,’ Poe swallows thickly. ‘If anyone can _bring him back_ , it’s her.’

Leia closes her eyes and lets out a breath. And it is written all over her face. Hope.

 

That night, Poe lays in his bed and lets the warmth of Rey’s proximity wash over him. Not as warm as Luke - nothing is ever as warm as Luke - but brighter, almost. With a jittery uncertain edge to it, that reminds Poe of a wild animal. The comfort of it is an ill-forgotten memory. It drowns him. It keeps him alive.

That night, Poe dreams of a blue-green tree.

**Author's Note:**

> [Find me on tumblr! u_u](http://ellianderjoy.tumblr.com/)


End file.
